The New MSP Service Level Agreement

SLA Playbook

How MSPs are customizing SLAs.

Prefabricated SLA templates can no longer be plucked from a hard drive and e-mailed to clients. MSPs must collaborate with customers to create an SLA that balances business

Hybrid cloud deployments and the era of always-on.

demands with the cost expectations of the service.Steve Groom, CEO of MSP Vissensa, offers insights on what MSPs should consider in creating custom SLAs.

Be specific about uptime.

“When it comes to the rate disinfectants kill bacteria, 99.9% might be sufficient—but that doesn’t work with promised uptime. 99.999% is 5.26 minutes per year, but go to 99.95%, and it’s 4.3 hours a year,” Groom says. “That’s a huge difference, especially when there’s mandatory downtime for patching.”

The in the details.devil’s

Set client expectations.

Groom: “The education process is closer to collaboration than explanation. Customers need to understand exactly what they should

Collaborate and educate.

be expecting from an SLA, and MSPs need to know what the objective of the SLA is in a business context.Identifying the critical services, such as

data recovery or network connectivity is key, so we can consider how to include these in an SLA.”

Cut the service credits. “As we get more and more into the expectation of always-on, there’s no point in offering a service credit if you fail to match the SLA,” Groom says. “The damage to a business of not being on, even for a brief moment, is exponential to what a service credit can make up for.”

Makingis hard to do.

up

SLAs need to work together.

“If a disk fails, we’ll respond and inform the customer, who might have a standing instruction implied in a service SLA,” Groom says. “But that has to be intertwined with

Keep your eye onthe big picture.

the hardware SLA, which considers the infrastructure. We have to be diligent in keeping them informed of our actions within the parameters of all our agreements.”

You might underdeliver.“The most important thing is not to overextend your SLAs beyond the SLAs that your upstream providers are able to commit to,” Groom says.

Don’t overpromise.

“That’s really key. If you skimp on a data center resource, overpromising on uptime is a guarantee you might not be able to match.”

Learn more.Read more about customized SLAs and the hybrid cloud from Pivot Point.